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Putin’s Pariah

It began inauspiciously. On a frozen afternoon in late November, as Moscow was draped with blocklong plastic billboards, banners and flags, each proclaiming a variation on a single theme — “POBEDA PUTINA — POBEDA ROSSII!” (“A Victory for Putin Is a Victory for Russia”) — a few thousand Russians converged on the city center for a rare act of political theater. It seemed, at first, like a tableau from the last days of the U.S.S.R., those heady months when glasnost swelled the streets with protesters. A handful of dissidents stood on a flatbed truck; a jumble of loudspeakers were stacked below; the crew of foreign reporters vastly outnumbered the local press; and across the way, the secret policemen with their unseen amplifiers were drowning the protest in canned laughter and Soviet waltzes.

That afternoon all eyes and lenses were fixed on Garry Kasparov, the valiant chess master trying in retirement to end the reign of Vladimir Putin. After Kasparov clapped his hands and shouted “Davai!” — “Let’s go!” — he started toward the Central Election Commission, where he planned to deliver a list of complaints. As he marched, however, it was clear that he was not alone at the head of the demonstration. He had locked arms with his unlikely comrade in one of modern Russia’s most quixotic quests — Edward Limonov, the 65-year-old poet-turned-populist who heads the National Bolshevik Party, or NBP.

After the presidential election in Russia, taking place today, not much is likely to change. Putin’s anointed successor, the young lawyer Dmitri Medvedev, is little more than a proxy. But there remains one genuine opposition force, the Other Russia, a threadbare alliance comprising the remnants of the Westernizing camp led by Kasparov and the banned National Bolsheviks, the Nat-Bols, as Limonov’s young followers call themselves. In the face of Kremlin control of the airwaves and the small army of police deployed to muzzle their protests, the alliance has proved more adept at internecine warfare than at grass-roots politicking.

Limonov, however, has not given up. With his bizarre, often half-baked yet latently sinister populism, he remains hellbent on ruining the Kremlin’s party. And despite his strident nationalism and affinity for rogue youth, he works in close partnership with the liberal-minded Kasparov. “Russia is rich in generals without armies,” Kasparov told me last fall. “But Limonov has foot soldiers. He commands street power.”

The crowd at the rally was not large; in fact it was depressingly small to anyone who remembered the last days of the U.S.S.R. Yet at the fore stood a disciplined corps of 200 or 300 Nat-Bols — young men and women dressed in black whose faces beamed with unexpected joy. The march ended, as expected, nearly as soon as it began. The riot police formed walls on either end of the procession and closed the vise. When they roughed up Kasparov and threw him in a paddy wagon, the foreign press surrounded it. When they sent him to jail for five days, European leaders and even George W. Bush’s spokesman issued peals of condemnation.

Limonov, however, also vanished. A babushka in the street swore he’d been hauled off, bag over his head. Ekho Moskvy, the liberal Moscow radio station and a last preserve of independent media in Russia, reported he had been arrested. No one, however, could find Limonov in the jails. Only days later, the truth emerged. “It was my boys,” Limonov told me. The Nat-Bols had forsworn their party flags — notoriously similar in color and design to the Nazis’, only with a black hammer and sickle replacing the swastika — and executed their game plan. Before the police could reach Limonov, his supporters carted him off. “My boys saved me,” he said. “Just like they can save the country.”

“Russia is back,” they like to say in Moscow these days. What a difference a sea of oil and gas can make. Bentleys, Maseratis and Maybach 62s — those Bavarian chariots that set you back upward of $400,000 — rule the prospekty. At the Ritz-Carlton, a new marble palace erected on the remains of the old Intourist Hotel across from Red Square, the smallest singles run $1,200 a night.

Still, in Moscow, and out across the hinterland, there is something else — a new generation untouched by high-speed globalization and mired in uncertainty. Russia’s youth ranges widely in its political sympathies — from the neo-Nazi thugs who posted the beheading of a dark-skinned man on the Internet to the neo-Soviet youth groups spawned by the Kremlin. But Limonov’s National-Bolsheviks came first and now stand somewhere in the middle of Russia’s odd political spectrum, part Merry Pranksters, part revolutionary vanguard. The party does not tally its membership, “for security reasons,” Limonov says, but claims to have 1,000 to 1,500 hardcore activists and some 56,000 loyalists. Unmoored by economic upheaval and unmoved by Putin’s restoration project, they have found in the NBP a satisfyingly fierce ideology, often mediated by black humor, that can be refashioned, as Limonov readily admits, “to fit anyone and anything.”

Limonov founded the NBP in 1993 after returning to Russia from years abroad. Since then, his message has changed — from anti-Americanism and anti-capitalism to anti-Putinism and anti-fascism — though rabid nationalism has dominated. He has sought the mantle of everyone from Mikhail Bakunin, the 19th-century anarchist, to Jean-Marie Le Pen, the French ultranationalist. He has shifted course so often that by now only the goal — revolution — and the means — young people — remain constants. “In the bureaucratic KGB-cop state, youth are expendable,” he has written. He maintains that young Russians, “physically the most powerful group in society,” are regarded by authorities as “the internal enemy,” just as the Chechens are seen as the external one. Disaffected youth are Russia’s “most exploited class” in Limonov’s view and, as he readily admits, his core supporters. There are young men with shaved heads in the party, though these days they are more likely to be left-wing punks than right-wing skinheads.

If the party’s agenda remains murky, its targets — and methods — are well known. Since the summer of 2003, the NBP has escalated its campaign of “direct actions,” propaganda stunts that have often led to prison terms. The “velvet terrorism,” as Limonov has called it, picked up when a Nat-Bol shot a jet of mayonnaise at Alexander Veshnyakov, the chairman of the Central Election Commission. Then there was the pelting of the Communist leader Gennadi Zyuganov with tomatoes, and the egging of Putin’s first prime minister, Mikhail Kasyanov, on election day in 2003. The following summer, after a law cut subsidies to the poor and elderly, the Nat-Bols raided the Ministry of Health. Three dozen party members took over offices on two floors, including the minister’s. For their participation in the action, seven Nat-Bols received jail sentences of 2.5 and 3 years.

The best-known stunt came just after May Day in 2005. Two young Nat-Bols rappelled down the face of the Rossiya Hotel, a Soviet monstrosity that until recently stood across from the Kremlin. From 11 stories up, Olga Kudrina, a 22-year-old Muscovite with long blond hair, and Yevgeny Logovsky, a 20-year-old from the small city of Arzamas, unfurled a 40-foot banner emblazoned with the words “PUTIN UIDI SAM!” (roughly, “Putin Retire Yourself!”). Kudrina and Logovsky also managed to drop leaflets offering the president further advice: “Dive After the Kursk!” — a reference to the submarine that sank in the Barents Sea in 2000, killing 118 sailors. The two smoked a couple of cigarettes and made a few cellphone calls before the police arrived with scissors and handcuffs. Logovsky got a suspended sentence. Kudrina, sentenced to three and a half years, went underground.

I first met Limonov last summer in a dimly lighted apartment in the center of Moscow. The apartment, which serves as the NBP chancellery, was tucked away on a grim side street in a concrete gulch below one of Moscow’s most fetid locales, the Kursk train station. I was met on the street and escorted by a man in his 20s who had a shaved head and wore a red T-shirt emblazoned with the words NOT MADE IN CHINA. As many as 20 Nat-Bols serve as bodyguards for Limonov, whom they address as Vozhd’, “the Leader.” It was the first time I had ever heard the word employed in speech, and I wondered if “the boys” knew the term was once reserved for Stalin.

The shtab — an officious term for headquarters — had the feel and all the comforts of an I.R.A. safe house. Limonov greeted me in all black — black jeans, black T-shirt, black narrow tie. With his glasses, thin mustache twisted to points at the ends and graying goatee, the Leader bears a striking resemblance to Leon Trotsky.

It was not always so. Back in the ’70s, when Limonov emerged from the underground as the author of the autobiographical novel “Eto Ya Edichka” (“It’s Me, Eddie”), he more closely resembled an extra in “Godspell.” Tight jeans, floppy-collared shirts and pimp-high platform shoes were essentials of his costume. He did his best to taunt and tease, seduce and castigate, but in an émigré demimonde crowded with agents provocateurs, provocation alone did not suffice. Emulating one of his heroes, Vladimir Mayakovsky, the poet of the revolution, he wanted to lay down his life for a cause. Just what cause, at least back in the U.S.S.R., remained unclear.

Limonov was born Edward Veniaminovich Savenko in 1943, the only child of an officer in Stalin’s secret police, in Dzerzhinsk, the most polluted town in the U.S.S.R. He grew up in the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv, the Soviet Detroit, where he skirted the local institutes, opting instead, after a stint in the foundry of the local Hammer and Sickle motor plant, for a job in a bookstore. In the early 1960s he edged into the underground world of Kharkiv’s fledgling bohemia. “We were all considered superfluous men and girls, and of this we were of course deeply proud,” says one of his closest friends at the time, Vagrich Bakhchanyan, invoking the traditional Russian literary conceit. It was Bakhchanyan, a painter, who christened Savenko “Limonov” — the name connotes “lemon.” (“He was very pale, almost yellow,” he says by way of explanation.) To a Russian ear it sounds impossible and strange — “something punk, like Johnny Rotten,” Limonov says.

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Edward LimonovCredit
Donald Weber

In 1967, Limonov moved to Moscow and acquired his first typewriter. “The capital was the dream of all poets in the U.S.S.R.,” he told me. “Not for publishing — impossible, but for women and glory.” He succeeded. Limonov self-published his poems samizdat-style, typing out copies and, unlike most of his comrades in the underground, hawking them for five rubles each. In 1974, the KGB called him in and offered him a choice — “rat out your degenerate friends or go into exile.” He left the U.S.S.R., first for Vienna, then Rome, before settling in New York. He did not go alone, but with “the beautiful Elena,” his second wife, who soon became, or so the legend goes, the first ex-Soviet fashion model to work in Manhattan.

Limonov says he has written “more than 44 books” — novels, poetry, prose and essays. For most Russian readers, however, he has written only one, his first — “Eto Ya Edichka,” published in New York in 1979. “Edichka” closes with a prediction that seems to have shaped his activities since:

“Whom shall I meet, what lies ahead, none can guess. I may happen upon a group of armed extremists, renegades like myself, and perish in an airplane hijacking or a bank robbery. I may not, and I’ll go away somewhere, to the Palestinians, if they survive, or to Colonel Qaddafi in Libya, or someplace else — to lay down Eddie-baby’s life for a people, for a nation.”

Completed in New York in 1976, and rife with profanity and graphic sex — all genders, all combinations — “Edichka” was rejected by three dozen U.S. publishers before it was accepted by an émigré Russian house. It later appeared in France as “Le poète russe préfère les grands nègres,” and in Germany, where it became a best seller. For many Russians, it stirred the biggest literary fuss since “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.” In 1983, when Random House published an English translation, Americans got a sense of why. On the second page, Edichka celebrates his dependency on the U.S. welfare system: “I consider myself to be scum, the dregs of society, I have no shame or conscience, therefore my conscience doesn’t bother me and I don’t plan to look for work, I want to receive your money to the end of my days.” To date, more than a million copies of the book have been sold in Russia.

The walls of Limonov’s office are lined with books — biographies of Mussolini and Che, a Russian edition of Leonard Cohen’s “Flowers for Hitler,” an economics text by Robert Heilbroner and a shelf full of KGB exposés. Above the books are large photographs, souvenirs of his tour of the unlovely little war zones of the post-Soviet era — Bosnia, Tajikistan, Abkhazia, Trans-Dniester. The images record Limonov, whether on a tank or on foot, shoulder to shoulder with real warriors. One stop, above all, enhanced his infamy: he was filmed shooting a machine gun in the company of Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb leader. When the Hague indicted Karadzic on war crimes, the footage — taken from a vantage overlooking the besieged city of Sarajevo — was shown in the courtroom. (It is now on YouTube.) To anyone who has read Limonov, the martial urge was not new. This is the man who wrote: “The love of weapons is in my blood. As far back as I can remember, when I was a little boy, I used to swoon at the mere sight of my father’s pistol. I saw something holy in the dark metal.”

Limonov has helped to import a new word from English into the Russian political vernacular: luzer. As a politician, he is, to put it charitably, feckless. “He has no hope of gaining state power,” says Alexei Venediktov, the director of Ekho Moskvy and one of Russia’s sharpest political journalists. “But that’s not what motivates him. Limonov loves the street, and like any fighter he needs an arena.”

Alexander Dugin, a 46-year-old philosopher who founded the NBP with Limonov, would agree. He and Limonov parted ways nearly a decade ago. Today, Dugin is best known as the high priest of Eurasianism and as an ideologue favored among the state security organs. (He serves as an unofficial “youth adviser” to the Kremlin.)

“The name made no difference to Limonov,” Dugin told me. “He wanted to call it ‘National Socialism,’ ‘National Fascism,’ ‘National Communism’ — whatever. Ideology was never his thing. . . . The scream in the wilderness — that was his goal.” Limonov, Dugin went on, is like “a clown in a little traveling circus, the kind that shuttled across America in the beginning of the 20th century, one of those guys in the freak show, a worm eater, or a bearded woman. The better he performs, the more attention he wins, the happier he is.”

The Kremlin, however, does not dismiss Limonov as a clown. In April 2001, the Leader was arrested for arms smuggling — “AK-47’s and some explosives,” he told me. The plot, as described in court, read like a page ripped from a history of the Bolsheviks’ earliest days: a terrorist takeover of a swath of northern Kazakhstan, the gold-mining region in Central Asia that, not coincidentally, is dominated by ethnic Russians. The judge, however, dropped the terrorism charge and sentenced Limonov to four years. He was released in the summer of 2003.

Four years later, Putin finally had enough. Russian authorities banned the NBP as an “extremist group.” “We are the first non-Muslim party to be banned,” Limonov said. “It is quite an honor.” The ruling has been challenged — and reaffirmed — several times, most recently last month. At least 14 Nat-Bols are in jail — including three women. Several more remain in hiding.

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The Kremlin has not only proved incapable of ignoring Limonov; it has also adopted his tactics. Putin’s ideologues, led by his deputy chief of staff, Vladislav Surkov, have created a raft of “youth groups” like Nashi (“Our Own”) and Molodaya Gvardiya (“the Young Guard”). As well financed, unyielding and patriotic as their patrons, they have earned the collective nickname “Putin Jugend.” While some discount their reach, and Nashi may soon lose its state financing, the British ambassador, Anthony Brenton, learned their power firsthand. Two years ago Nashi activists — Nashisty, as the Nat-Bols call them, with a deliberate ring of fashisty, fascists — began shadowing the diplomat in Moscow. For months, they leafleted his car, picketed his residence and heckled him in public, before the Russian foreign minister stepped in. Brenton’s offense? He had attended an opposition conference, sitting in the company of Limonov.

The anti-Limonov campaign has only grown uglier. On Nov. 22, two days before the march in Moscow, Yuri Chervochkin, a young Nat-Bol activist, was attacked as he posted campaign notices near his home in the Moscow suburb of Serpukhov. (On the Other Russia list of 359 Duma candidates, Chervochkin had been No. 180.) Earlier that day, he called a journalist, reporting that he was being trailed by the police. He recognized the officers, he said, from previous encounters. Severely beaten, Chervochkin fell into a coma. On Dec. 10, three weeks shy of his 23rd birthday, he died.

“Edik was never political,” says Bakhchanyan, Limonov’s old friend. “New York politicized him. This city was his awakening.” Five years older than Limonov, Bakhchanyan was a veteran of Kharkiv’s bohemian circles when he brought the hopeful provincial to Moscow. In the capital, painter and poet roomed together. Then in the early 1970s, Bakhchanyan was the one who encouraged Limonov and Elena to join his wife and him in exile.

Limonov, who is not Jewish, left the U.S.S.R. on an exit visa intended for Soviet Jews, in 1974, following the departure of Solzhenitsyn, Brodsky and Baryshnikov. The poet loved to rail against those icons of the so-called Third Wave of Soviet emigration. But Brodsky, the greatest poet of his generation, was the one Limonov envied most. “He liked my poetry,” Limonov told me. “He really did.” (Others who knew both men second the claim.) Brodsky, Limonov went on to say, “was the one who took me to Tatiana Yakovleva and Alexander Liberman’s” — the East 70th Street home of the Condé Nast editorial director and his wife. “Amazing, extraordinary personalities. Big people. Not only to me but the whole of the Russian émigré world. Brodsky introduced me to them — he wanted to help me.

“I was this underground poet,” he continued, “a freak in jeans and high heels. But Brodsky was a psychologist — he knew I knew Lilya Brik in Moscow, Mayakovsky’s old mistress.” Tatiana Yakovleva had also been Mayakovsky’s lover. Brodsky, Limonov recalls, “understood that Tatiana would like to hear about the woman who stole Mayakovsky from her.” Limonov inserted himself in the Libermans’ circle. Having worked as a tailor in Moscow, he made clothes for Tatiana. He and Elena were invited to the Libermans’ soirees. He made his way into Baryshnikov’s world too. “Misha read ‘Edichka’ between rehearsals,” Limonov claims. “And loved it!”

Limonov arrived in New York in 1975, at the dawn of punk. He discovered CBGB, fell for Patti Smith and Richard Hell and knew everyone from Steve Rubell to the local members of the Socialist Workers Party. “Edichka” oozes with bodily fluids — the hero, abandoned by his wife, Elena, goes on “nocturnal rambles on the West Side” that feature serial sexual encounters with homeless black men. The thin plot lines, however, thread two dominant leitmotifs: self-indulgence and condescension. “Edichka” may have been cast as a postmodern Underground Man — debauched and self-pitying, prickly in his pride and scornful of others. But his creator comes off like a cross between Mailer, the public brawler and political freelancer, and Mayakovsky, the restive and ultimately self-destructive literary revolutionary. “I did something no other Russian writer ever did,” Limonov says. “I broke down the wall. There were only two types of literature at the time: Soviet and anti-Soviet. My books were just books, about my life first and foremost.”

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THIS AINT NO PARTY (YET): A farewell gathering for the artist and author Vagrich Bakhchanyan (in box, left) in March 1974, shortly before he left Russia. Limonov, next to him, was also soon to emigrate (that is, was asked to leave). Credit
Vadim Krokhin

Late in 1978, Limonov found the émigré’s ultimate sinecure. He moved into 6 Sutton Square, a 17-room mansion at the dead end of 58th Street. The U.N. secretary general’s residence was around the corner. Limonov had entered the employ of Peter Sprague, at the time the chairman of National Semiconductor and co-chairman of Aston Martin, the English sports-car maker. Limonov later wrote a novel, “His Butler’s Story,” chronicling those years.

Sprague insists the novel does not record reality. “It was as if Hunter Thompson had written ‘The Nanny Diaries,’ ” he told me over drinks in Midtown Manhattan. “I know from butlers. Edward seems to have never understood the difference between ‘housekeeper’ and ‘butler.’ ”

The two made an intriguing match. An entrepreneur and onetime New York Congressional candidate (he ran as a Republican against the incumbent, Ed Koch), Sprague had quit working on a Ph.D. in economics at Columbia to start a chicken farm in Iran. He also had his own ties to the Russian literary world. The poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko was a friend, as was another poet, Bella Akhmadulina. “For a time, my house was a crash pad for a wide slice of Russia’s cultural minority,” Sprague said.

Asked why he hired Limonov, Sprague drew a blank. “Hardly spoke to the guy, I was traveling so much,” he said. “Edward made borscht and he made coffee. And he drank his way through a fine wine cellar. What else he did, beats me.” The cellar held more than a thousand bottles, but to Sprague what lingers is Limonov’s portrayal of him as a Gatsby-like figure. “He got it all wrong,” Sprague says. “At the time I was bottoming out, and before long I lost everything, including the house.” Limonov remained in Sprague’s employ until 1980, but by 1982 he was living in Paris with Natalya Medvedeva, a model and singer who would become his new wife. In France, Limonov basked in the critics’ spotlight, but with the Soviet collapse and the restoration of his citizenship, he returned to Moscow. Within months he entered the fray; Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the head of the Liberal Democrats — who were neither liberal nor democratic — invited Limonov to join his shadow cabinet.

It has been an eventful winter in Russia — one of those periods when the fatalists among the locals, which is to say nearly everyone, cock an eye and forecast a Smutnoe vremya>, a “time of troubles.” In the wake of the November march and Kasparov’s arrest, the Other Russia coalition was all but dead. Kasyanov, the former prime minister who was once egged by the NBP, reawakened hopes when he broke sharply with Putin and joined the opposition — but he and Kasparov feuded. “Two giant egos in a single room,” Limonov told me, explaining the problem with a Russian proverb: “They tried to divide the bearskin before the bear was dead.”

On Dec. 2, Putin got the Duma he ordered. In elections that the West condemned as a sham, United Russia, the Kremlin’s party, increased its share of the Duma’s 450 seats to 315. Even Andrei Lugovoi, wanted by British authorities for the murder of the former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko, won a seat, running as a liberal Democrat. Then on Dec. 10, Putin named Medvedev his favored heir, and the next day, Medvedev named Putin his favorite for prime minister. On Dec. 13, Kasparov, at the funeral for Chervochkin, the murdered Nat-Bol, ended his bid for the presidency. Kasyanov, hoping to run on his own, was denied access to the ballot.

But if the Other Russia hasn’t amounted to much, it is just about all that Putin’s foes have. In a recent conversation, Kasparov told me that his alliance with Limonov has borne fruit: “We helped dismantle the democratic aura of Putin’s regime.” Limonov and Kasparov plan to hold marches the day after election day and are thinking boldly of convening some kind of “alternative parliament” later this month. Yet state power in Russia, it seems, will play on, like an infinite loop, in the same hands.

One Friday afternoon in late November, I returned to the shtab. It was early, but the Moscow sky was gray-black. The streets sloping away from the train station were filled with icy swales and the cast of old — a trio of grizzled men who’d spent the morning drinking their pensions; two boys, no gloves, no hats, no older than 14, drinking Czech beer from large bottles, hands welded to the green glass; a line of women swaddled in woolens, selling herbs from the countryside. Limonov operates, I realized, out of a corner of the city that reveals no sign of the changes of the last two decades. The skies continued to darken. The only brightness came from a giant illuminated billboard: “A Victory for Putin Is a Victory for Russia!” it read, but no one took note of the victory promise. Everyone, whether climbing the hill or dodging the streetcars, moved slowly, in silence.

This time, as I entered, the bodyguards took their leave, and the Leader dead-bolted the iron door. Though the office was dark, he did not turn on a light. Limonov seemed unnerved. He kept taking his wristwatch off and putting it on, turning it over in his hands. He swiveled time and again toward the windows, clouded with dirt and the cold, to scan the courtyard outside.

A fat manuscript dominated the desk. “Just finished,” Limonov said, packing it up with care. “It’s something completely insane, which of course makes me insanely happy.” We spoke of a Putin speech (he’d referred to opposition leaders as “jackals”) and Kasparov’s stubbornness (the chess master called twice during our talk).

Again, Limonov was wearing black: black turtleneck, black jeans, black dress shoes. In the gray light seeping in, he looked almost spectral. He was wearing his usual pinkie ring, but now I also noticed a wedding band. He married for the sixth time two years ago. (Limonov enjoys marriage. Two former wives, however, have died, the first by suicide. “That one,” Limonov said, “had nothing to do with me.”) Katya Volkova, his new wife, is an actress and a singer. At 33, she is a stunning woman, at the height of her career and recently radicalized. When I noted in an earlier talk that Katya is nearly half his age, Limonov sighed. “That’s nothing. I was with a 16- or 17-year-old before prison.”

The two and a half years Limonov spent behind bars earlier in the decade proved a boon to his writing; it was his most prolific time since his days in New York welfare hotels. In prison, he finished eight books — “nearly 2,000 pages,” he said, measuring his output like a Soviet shock worker. The guards left him alone to write. He only had “to push a button and ask to go to work,” he said. Limonov emerged from jail, in the Russian tradition, with a manifesto, “a series of lectures for NBP members”: “Drugaya Rossiya” (“the Other Russia”). Kasparov liked the title; it became the name of their coalition. An inchoate wide-ranging treatise, the book calls for a “new civilization,” a collection of “armed communes” to replace the evils of urban Russia and restore the insulted and injured to their rural roots. To reverse Russia’s dismal birth rate, polygamy will be permitted, free love encouraged and childbirth required, “like military service for men.” Abortion will be outlawed, and all women, before they reach 35, must have “no fewer than four children for the motherland.” Limonov, however, wants to have it all. “One should not view the new civilization as a leap backward,” he wrote. “The newly civilized shall not wage war against science, against the useful and intelligent achievements of technological progress. Not at all. We will develop the Internet and genetics and HDTV. TV and the Internet will unite the armed communes as one in the unified civilization of free citizens.” The takeover of power, Limonov promised, will not come from an external force, as it did in Afghanistan when the Taliban swept in from refugee camps in Pakistan. “It will come from within.”

Limonov sleeps in three different locales. Lately he’d been sleeping here, in the party office. He does not want his family disturbed. (His first child, a boy named Bogdan — “God-given” — was born to him and Katya on Revolution Day, 2006.) There may be “slozhnosti” — “difficulties,” the Soviet euphemism for trouble with the state. The police were sleeping here, too. He nodded toward the dvor, the courtyard now filled with parked cars. “They sleep in their Zhigulis. Poor guys.”

Limonov spoke of the revolution to come, the need for Russians to cast off the yoke of “Putinism” and liberate themselves from the KGB state. It was a monologue oft rehearsed, but when a dog outside barked loudly, he stumbled. He tried again: running down the list of Nat-Bols who will soon get out of prison and ticking off the schedule for “street actions,” with or without Kasparov, Kasyanov or any other leaders of the deflated opposition. Yet somehow he seemed lost, a performance artist who could not perform.

Edichka, I realized, was drifting. Not just away from the interview, but from Kasparov, the evil Putin, the Nat-Bols, even his newfound familial bliss. A man in a long dark coat entered the courtyard with his back to us. “The Ramones,” Limonov said, watching the figure move amid the cars. “I knew them. Not just Joey. All of them. It was a rich life then. Never knew Warhol but I did see him, more than once, at Tatiana’s parties. I always felt inferior. You see, I had a complex of inferiority. Avedon was there, too. And Dali. And Warhol. Capote, too. Tatiana gave ‘Edichka’ to him. Capote read one chapter. He was very enthusiastic. He was. We met only once, on the East Side, when he lived at the U.N. Plaza. Capote always came to Tatiana’s. It was always an enormous crowd. Once I stood near Vladimir Kirillovich — the Romanov heir. It was a great time, a legendary time. I have now a certain nostalgia.”

For a moment, Limonov fell quiet, studying the watch in his hands. After a time, he lifted his head sharply and, averting my eyes, looked out to the dvor. The man was still there, whether cop or secret policeman or parking attendant, no one could say. “It’s exciting, and dangerous of course, what we’re doing now,” he said. “But to have lived in the ’70s in New York, it means a lot. Still.”

Correction: March 1, 2008

An article on Page 32 of The Times Magazine this weekend about Edward Limonov, a Russian novelist and political dissident, misspells the name of a city he spent time in during the early ’60s. It is Kharkiv, not Kharkov.

Andrew Meier is the author of “Black Earth: A Journey Through Russia After the Fall” and “The Lost Spy,” which will be published this summer.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page MM32 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: Putin’s Pariah. Today's Paper|Subscribe